At my house, I have a Linux fileserver. This is where the large disks live.
Tivo Desktop seems to not want to place "My Tivo Recordings" on a network
drive. This is disappointing, since I just bought a 250 GB drive for the server specifically to use for this purpose.

At my house, I have a Linux fileserver. This is where the large disks live.
Tivo Desktop seems to not want to place "My Tivo Recordings" on a network
drive. This is disappointing, since I just bought a 250 GB drive for the server specifically to use for this purpose.

Can this really be true?

I just checked my TiVo Desktop 2.2 "preferences" and it allows me to use my Buffalo Linkstation 250GB NAS to store recordings. My Windows PC sees the Linkstation as an additional drive in "My Computer". The Linkstation is a Linux based device.

There are a number of different ways to serve files to Windows from the network.
The netwrok drives that my Tivo Desktop will not use are exported from a "real" linux system as SAMBA shares, i.e.
Map \\SERVER\video to drive T:

When I set the video storage location in Tivo Desktop to V:\FromTivo it keeps bringing the selection dialog back. If I then proceed to push the transfer, it brings the file selection dialog up twice for each file I request to transfer. It actually knows where I want to go: The file tree in the selection dialog is positioned to the unacceptable device, but the transfer never starts. If I use any folder on C: it is happy.

There must be a check that the drive is a local drive, not a network drive.

If your NAS shows up as a "clean" drive letter with no reference to a workgroup server in you "open file" dropdown lists in Windows, that means Windows does not know it is not a local hard drive.

Has anybody else tried to use a network drive for file storage?

Quote:

Originally Posted by JacksTiVo

The Linkstation is a Linux based device.

So is the Tivo, but you can't mount the Tivo's drive directly to Windows. It is irrelevant that there is Linus in the NAS: It is a closed black box as far as the outside world is concerned.

I think it is a Samba version issue. Some NASes use a version that works and some don't. The poster above has a Linkstation and it works, my Kurobox doesn't. I know his software is more up to date than mine even though the hardware may in fact be nearly identical. Bot are Linux boxes, but they don't run the same Samba version or Linux Kernel.

At my house, I have a Linux fileserver. This is where the large disks live.
Tivo Desktop seems to not want to place "My Tivo Recordings" on a network
drive. This is disappointing, since I just bought a 250 GB drive for the server specifically to use for this purpose.

Can this really be true?

If your PC can access the share without any problems the TiVo Desktop shouldn't either. Try mapping a drive letter to the share. If that doesn't work you could always try one of the older Galleon versions, 2.1 would be a good one. This java app will give you the same functionality as the TiVo Desktop on your linux box.

If your PC can access the share without any problems the TiVo Desktop shouldn't either. Try mapping a drive letter to the share. If that doesn't work you could always try one of the older Galleon versions, 2.1 would be a good one.

Yes, it is common that some Windows applications will not work with a file name string beginning with \\SERVER\share ... but work well when the share is assigned a drive letter. But as I hinted with my example above, I already did that, and it did not work.

What I really would like to do is just periodically run a Linux job to pull any files from the Tivo that I don't already have on the file server. I have spent some time mucking around with *wget* and I can see the path forward; however it will take some serious work to do that, because
- the files delivered by the Tivo come up with SICK file names (including slashes).
- the nowplaying/index.html file is a single line of very ugly HTML that needs massaging before parsing.
So now I am looking at writing a PERL script that does
- wget index?Recurse=Yes
- massage it with a SED script that breaks it into a line per file (or a line per column of the table per file)
- build a table of program names, episode names, file sizes and broadcast dates
- spawn a wget for each file, massaging the file name into something clean

Using Tivo Desktop on a Windows client to to the fetching was my short-term stopgap to do while working on the scripting.

Using Galleon on the Linux box is probably not a solution. I do not run X on the server (an old 233MHz AMD K2 machine with 128MB of RAM).

I'm beginning to think that putting a 250GB drive on the Tivo is a better (or at least simpler) short-term solution.

But back to the problem at hand: Observing the behaviour of Tivo Desktop 2.2, it certainly looks like it finds the folder I am requesting, then checks to see its properties and rejects it because it is a network mount. But if others have used SAMBA shares without problems, then it must be something else.

Can we make a list of what seems to work and what not?

In my case:
Server: Linuc FC3 with SAMBA
Fails to use share for video storage
Mounted as drive V:\

Interestingly, it works fine to export music and photo directries from similarly mounted shares.

Yes, it is common that some Windows applications will not work with a file name string beginning with \\SERVER\share ... but work well when the share is assigned a drive letter. But as I hinted with my example above, I already did that, and it did not work.

What I really would like to do is just periodically run a Linux job to pull any files from the Tivo that I don't already have on the file server. I have spent some time mucking around with *wget* and I can see the path forward; however it will take some serious work to do that, because
- the files delivered by the Tivo come up with SICK file names (including slashes).
- the nowplaying/index.html file is a single line of very ugly HTML that needs massaging before parsing.
So now I am looking at writing a PERL script that does
- wget index?Recurse=Yes
- massage it with a SED script that breaks it into a line per file (or a line per column of the table per file)
- build a table of program names, episode names, file sizes and broadcast dates
- spawn a wget for each file, massaging the file name into something clean

Using Tivo Desktop on a Windows client to to the fetching was my short-term stopgap to do while working on the scripting.

Using Galleon on the Linux box is probably not a solution. I do not run X on the server (an old 233MHz AMD K2 machine with 128MB of RAM).

I'm beginning to think that putting a 250GB drive on the Tivo is a better (or at least simpler) short-term solution.

But back to the problem at hand: Observing the behaviour of Tivo Desktop 2.2, it certainly looks like it finds the folder I am requesting, then checks to see its properties and rejects it because it is a network mount. But if others have used SAMBA shares without problems, then it must be something else.

Can we make a list of what seems to work and what not?

In my case:
Server: Linuc FC3 with SAMBA
Fails to use share for video storage
Mounted as drive V:\

Interestingly, it works fine to export music and photo directries from similarly mounted shares.

A few things to note about Galleon. It can automatically pull shows from the TiVo based on keywords without having to manually select them. Also I don't think X has to be running for Galleon to work, though it may have to be running to configure it. Three, Galleon on your PC will likely not have the problem with the network drive, so perhaps the latest and greatest version for the PC is your solution. Installing Galleon will certainly identify if the issue lies with TiVo Desktop or your file access permissions.

Lastly, have you tried to use a drive letter closer to A: Some applications have problems mapping to drives so obviously not local. Try mapping to B, D, E, or F if you have one of those available. I pretty much had the same configuration as you when TD first came out, but the problem I had involved the DRM on the files. I would get the DRM crap warning after playing the file for a few minutes. Lately that's not the case however as they've seemed to correct that issue.

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Lastly, have you tried to use a drive letter closer to A: Some applications have problems mapping to drives so obviously not local. Try mapping to B, D, E, or F if you have one of those available.

I moved the network share mapping to drive G: with no improvement.

I am currently playing with a wget-based script running on Linux to pull the files from Tivo to the linux-server:/video/FromTivo. In the first pass, I simply did a wget of the entire Tivo html space.
It ran almost 3 days, but got the full set. I pulled the Recurse=Yes version of the HTML index to linux, massaged it with a SED script (it was all one line of text; I put line breaks before <TR and after </TD>) to make it more readable, then wrote a perl script to rename the .TiVo files to a name similar to that provided by Tivo Desktop.

I will probably turn this into a perl script that gets the index, then gets each file, renaming it as it comes in, and keeping track of which files have already been retrieved (so they can be skipped) by means of the 6-digit index number of each recording, which is part of the download URL for the file. With that I should be able to kick the script off once a day and get copies of anything that has passed through the Tivo. The only negatives with this plan ere:
1) The HTML index says the file was recorded on "Wed 5/24" but not what year.
2) Tivo Desktop does not show the various extra information (episode name, recording date) for these files. I have not yet played with it enough to know if TD will PLAY them or they need to be unprotected before they become playable.

It would be so much simpler if TD would not reject my samba-mounted directory.

Why not just run the TivoDesktop on the fileserver and just remotely manage it as needed/wanted?

His fileserver is a Linux box. TD doesn't come in that flavor, however Galleon does and will accomplish everything he's trying to do. He could run Galleon from his desktop computer or his Linux box automatically pulling shows off the TiVo by keyword. Getting it to run on Linux would be a minor challenge to most people, but to this guy it would likely be a breeze.

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try not to use tivo desktop to get the files, from the linux box just h t t p s into it, i find the transfers go faster this way.

Look back a couple of posts, and you will see that have have been playing around with a script driven version of that. I used the wget program on linux, which is basically a quasi-browser, that takes either a single file or a whole directory. It is commonly used to set up mirrors of websites.

It worked almost acceptably. It took about 3 days to get the whole "NowPlaying" folder over to the Linux box. The files had ugly names (ending not in .tivo but in ...id=123456), but by reconciling with the web page that has the index of what is now playing on the tivo, and extracting the episode names from the display text, I got them decent names. That was two nights ago. Imagine my surprise when discovering that the files thus downloaded were not playable due to "Wrong Media Key".

I am now repeating the exercise, using the standard browser on the Windows-PC that also as Tivo Desktop installed to do the download, just to see if web-downloaded files in general are broken.

I may yet give up and just put a 250 GB Hard Drive on the Tivo. That looks more and more like the simpler solution. That is discouraging.

It would be so much simpler if TD would not reject my samba-mounted directory.

I have just typed up a letter describing the problem (as well as why I am doing this) which I will be mailing to Customer Support at Tivo Inc. Has to be paper mail - they have deleted the email address they used to offer for customer support .

It is a problem that has been posted on the support forums a few times over the months. I hope that the next version of TiVo Desktop will fix it. It doesn't work on my Kuro, but I know someone who was successfull using a Linkstation 2. I have not been able to tease out what the differences are, but I know that they are pretty big given the kuro runs a 2.4 kernel and two year old version of Samba the LS2 runs a 2.6 kernel. In any event, there is no reason TiVo desktop should not work with both. Hopefully it is an easy bugfix and will be working in the next revision.

I just checked my TiVo Desktop 2.2 "preferences" and it allows me to use my Buffalo Linkstation 250GB NAS to store recordings. My Windows PC sees the Linkstation as an additional drive in "My Computer". The Linkstation is a Linux based device.

I'm having the exact same problem using a Buffalo Linkstation. The Linux solution above doesn't work for me as my computers are all windows. What I'm really trying to do is use the network drive to view programs on my television through the Tivo. This works when saved on the C drive but not when I map the Buffalo to a different letter.

JacksTIVO, could you let me know more about your setup so I can try to figure out why you can make this work with a Linkstation and I can't?

Just wanted to confirm lpoulsen's experience in case (s)he needs corroboration if and when TiVo support contacts him.

I have an old Windows2000 server on which I run Tivo Desktop version 2.2. It has SCSI disks that are a whopping 17GB in size - used to be plenty for vending documents etc. Since one needs more space these days, my photos and music are on a network storage device (an Infrant ReadyNAS 600) and while TD can't see the network shares directly (i.e. when configured as //rn600/media/Music etc.) it can see them when I map drive letters to them. Since I have the RN600 set up in user mode, I also had to modify the Tivo Beacon service to use a specific user logon rather than the LocalSystem account.

However, the same procedure does not work for video files. TivoDesktop refuses to use the network drive as a valid source and destination for TTG functions. Indeed, when I try to configure it the TivoServer crashes and has to be manually restarted. It gives me the following error message when I try to configure it:

The selected recordings folder cannot be used. Please select a different folder.
(and the TivoServer icon disappears from the system tray)

I have temporarily attached a 120GB USB 2.0 external drive to the server which TD sees ok.

I did use Galleon and it had no issues using network drives for any function but at least for me, it tended to be unstable. Functions would simply crash and often I would have to restart both the Galleon service on the Server AND the TiVo DVR to get HME functions working again. It's a shame because Galleon did provide superior functionality to TD. However, since the Galleon developer has stopped supporting the application I must choose reliability over functionality and TD has the edge right now. Plus some of the HME functions for which I used Galleon are now available directly on the TiVo since the release of 7.2 software.

Anyway, if you need to cite another HME user who is disgusted with the lack of simple connectivity to network drives, I'm your man.

I think that CuriousMark's idea of incompatible Samba versions is probably right. I don't know what version (if any) is in my RN600 because it runs a proprietary Linux build created by Infrant specifically for their NAS products. Having said this, clearly the TD software uses a different method (albeit perhaps just different code) to access the recordings than it is for Music and Photos. If the methods were they same, I would think that mapping to the NAS should work for all access types.

Has anyone heard more about this issue? I'm having the exact same problem with a D-Link DSM-G600 network storage device -- I've got it mapped to a letter drive and Tivo keeps rejecting it as a storage choice.

I know *nothing* about programming -- Windows or Linux -- but I did notice two differences between the network drive and the onboard drive:

-- The DSM-G600 also runs Linux and formats the hard disk in EXT3. My other disks are formatted as FAT32 or NTFS. I wonder if this would make a difference?

-- And, on the totally superficial side, I've noticed that if I try to copy the "My Tivo" file directly to the network drive (even when it's empty), I can create the new folder, but the Tivo folder icon doesn't show in File Explorer.

Anyway, sorry if those observations are too obvious to be useful, but I'm hoping to spark some thinking to make this work.

I have been trying to troubleshoot this issue as well, having recently purchased a Buffalo Tech TeraStation Pro NAS. I am trying to determine if drives mapped to NAS devices (as opposed to USB drives attached to computers on the network) are causing the problem, or if the XFS file system on my partic. NAS is the issue.

FYI, I can successfully change the "My TiVo Recordings" folder to be a folder on a mapped drive that points to a USB drive attached to a different computer on my network (not just a USB drive on the local computer running TDtop), which is good, but I cannot point it to a mapped drive pointing to a folder on my NAS. When I try the latter and press "apply/ok", it says that that folder has been changed/moved/deleted.

Ok, so trying to isolate this more and have found the following: if I map a local drive letter to my NAS folder, mark it to work Offline, and then disconnect the NAS, the system works perfectly via TiVo. I am becoming more inclined to believe that this might be file system related since my NAS (TeraStation Pro) is running XFS for the primary store, and will try 1 last troubleshooting step hopefully tonight by attempting to map to a USB drive, formatted NTFS, that is plugged into the NAS directly. Again, any insight from others would be welcomed since solving this would be fantastic for all... (anyone have problems mapping to an NTFS-formatted NAS?)

Had the same problem with a samba mount; set up NFS client on WIN XP and mounted an NFS share on XP for TIVO desktop to use instead...

TIVO desktop displayed the same error (refused to "remember" the save to location).
Perhaps this is a "feature", not a bug. This is really bad, my mediapc has only 40GB, but my linux box (CenOS) has 1.3TB......

AN option that was mentioned earlier in this thread but seems to be getting overlooked is Galleon:

Galleon runs on either Windows or Linux

Galleon will use a networked drive for storing or serving up Tivo or MPEG-2 streams

Galleon also lets you setup multiple folders for "GoBack" - which if you have a Buffalo NAS device (I have two of the TerraStation Pro devices myself) is very useful to avoid having to scroll through hundreds or thousands of files

So, for most of the folks in this Thread, I think the "quick" fix would be to use Galleon in addition to, or in place of Tivo Desktop.

Tivo Desktop 2.3a seems to fix the network access problem for video. I've been experimenting with Orb (a software alternative to slingbox and hava) and since Orb doesn't support my Windows 2000 Server, I installed it on my desktop. I also installed 2.3a on my desktop. The combination allowed Orb to see my Tivo and both transfer and stream shows to an internet connected device (a laptop in my case connected via an external network). Rather than maintain two separate folders for shows, I thought I'd see if Tivo Desktop on my desktop pc would access the media storage folder on my server. Orb uses the Tivo Desktop to determine the destination folder for transfers and the source for streaming. So, I configured the Tivo Desktop preferences to use the media folder using its network share name (\\servername\folder\folder etc. style - not using a mapped drive letter). Lo and behold, Tivo Desktop did not complain about the setting (as previous versions did), sees the network link and operates correctly with it.

I then ran another experiment to see if the Tivo Desktop on my server could connect to a folder on my NAS unit. This too worked fine although switching back to the folder on the server's local drive caused some sort of "internal error" in Tivo Desktop which I couldn't get around until I rebooted the server. When it restarted, the Tivo server indicated that the videos folder had changed and forced a reset to the default folder. I was then able to reset it to the correct location (the network shared media folder on a different drive in the server). I haven't quite figured out why this error occurred although it might be due to my desktop installation getting in the way somehow. I may have been able to get around this just by stopping and starting the Tivo services but I'll try that later.

Anyway, this is good news for those of us who want to store our Tivo transfers on a network share or separate device using Tivo Desktop instead of Galleon (which is a great program but for whatever reason wasn't reliable in my configuration).

BTW, Orb is working on a version of their software that will allow streaming directly from the Tivo without the need to transfer to the pc first. For those of you who haven't heard of Orb and are interested, just go to http://www.orb.com and download DVR everywhere.

Um...Do you have an XP machine that can see the network drive?
Do you have TiVo Desktop on that machine?
Can you map to the drive from the XP machine?
If so make that drive where your .tivo files reside.
That's sorta what we do here...with out Linux...and a USB drive.

It simply does not work for me using a Buffalo Terastation. I have a drive mapped as V: and a folder in it named TiVo Video. TD 2.3a refuses to map to it, even if I populate the folder with .tivo files. I can map to a USB drive, which I'm doing now, but the Terastation has a lot more room.

Not as clean...but what if...
You place the downloaded files on the Teradrive...
Create shortcuts
and place them in your TiVoToGo folder?
Of course that means you are not downloading directly to the Teradrive...
But at least files stored on the Teradrive would be available for TiVo viewing.

Bud8man, not sure if you were proposing an alternative solution for me but I don't need one now that Tivo Desktop 2.3a is working over the network for me. My first post on this topic back in June mentioned the problem of my Windows 2000 server running TD2.2 failing to recognize a folder on my Infrant ReadyNAS 600 as a target location on which to store (and retrieve) video. It would map ok for music and photos but not for video. I had tested the same configuration using my XP machine running TD2.2 but it had exactly the same problem. I could map the video folder on the RN600 fine on XP but TD2.2 wouldn't recognize it. Other posts surmised that the problem might be to do with SAMBA code.

I have updated my RN600 recently with new software from Infrant so perhaps this is what has fixed the problem for me particularly if Lafos still can't see his Terastation with TD2.3a (bummer, sorry about that). It didn't occur to me that the network drive access problem might actually be on the RN600 side since I could map audio and pictures ok. If I get some spare time, I might regress one of my systems to TD2.2 and see if the network drive access problem recurs.

For now, I'm running Tivo Desktop 2.3a on both my Windows 2000 server and my XP desktop PC, the latter to use Orb for testing streaming (since Orb doesn't support Win2K without a lot of mucking about).

Well, I regressed my XP machine to TD2.2 and to my surprise it could now see the video storage networked location on my ReadyNAS 600 unit configured as \\Servername\folder\folder etc. I assume that it would also work with a mapped drive letter but I didn't bother trying that.

Thus, it would appear that it's the software update from Infrant that has enabled the network configuration to work for me and not TD2.3a. Mea Culpa for assuming it was a TiVo software problem. I'm still at a loss to explain why the audio and pictures mappings worked in the earlier Infrant software but the video mapping did not. It may be to do with how the code accesses the locations - they are configured differently in TD.

When I get the chance, I'll ask the Infrant support guys if they could shed any light on this situation.

Lafos, unfortunately it looks like you may need to get Buffalo to update their software for the Terastation to support this.

2.3a is not working either for me. That is, seeing the network drive does not work. I will regress the Desktop back to 2.2 then.SOLUTION FOR ME:
I uninstalled and re-installed and it worked fine. If I am not mistaken I would point the finger at the uninstall of previous version from the 2.3a installation. For some reason I did not feel comfortable with it and thought to uninstall 2.3a from the control panel, add remove programs and then ran the 2.3a installation again. It worked for me. Everything is running as it should.